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Bolivian Doctors Fighting For Socialism

Andre Vltchek

It is late morning, May 27th,
2012, and one of the squares of the Bolivian city of Cochabamba is
colorful and festive. The police and army are patrolling the area, but
they are apparently also enjoying the Sunday morning, looking more like
some characters from an Italian comical opera than the strict upholders
of the law.

The
square is full. It is packed with indigenous women, some carrying
children on their backs, some with cotton sacks in their hands, almost
all wearing hats.

Hundreds
of local women have come to the square to register their babies and
children inside the provisory tents erected by the government. Most of
these kids were born out of wedlock; something that would be just a few
years ago deplored by society, even considered immoral and shameful.
Things are changing now and fingers are pointing accusatively in
different directions, while the state is trying to register everybody
regardless of how he or she came to this earth, as without the proper
registration, children and adults have no right for government
assistance.

In
2005, Evo Morales became for the first time the President of Bolivia
and despite some vicious and determined resistance and attempts to
destabilize his government from both the West and the ranks of Bolivian
elites, things began changing rapidly for this nation with the greatest
indigenous majority in South America. And “The Process” never stopped,
never even slowed down.

Now
in Cochabamba like in most other parts of the country, both the city
and the state are encouraging women to come forward: to list their
children, to talk about the abuse they have been facing from family and
society, to check themselves for breast cancer, for tuberculosis, to
learn how to prepare healthy food themselves and for their children.

In
the past I would have never dared to take photographs of Bolivian women
and their children point blank. There were legends about stealing the
soul through the lenses of cameras, and there was a creeping lack of
trust. If I had attempted to ask questions, most of them would go
unanswered. In the past, there was always a thick fog of suspicion
floating in the air, mixed with resentment and fear. Now, it is as if
the fog has cleared, the dam has burst, and the bitterness accumulated
over years and decades has begun to flow, transforming, begging to lend
itself to stories. The fear has miraculously vanished, replaced by hope,
and the stories that have begun emerging were full force.

Most
of the stories were simple and they spoke of pain, of simple and
faithful women being abandoned by their husbands and spouses, for no
apparent reason when they were pregnant or when other women crossed
their path. But there were also other stories, those of injustice and
abuse, of social wrongs, full of outrage and rebelliousness.

“Two
of my children died when they were little”, said one of the mothers
facing me defiantly as if I had been designated to bear at least some
part of the responsibility. She showed me with her harsh, hardworking
hands how small they were: “that little”, she kept repeating in
disbelief, “that tiny”. Then looking straight to my eyes: “Why?”

I
knew why and so did she. There was nothing to be said, but looking at
me she somehow knew that I heard what she was saying and that her words
would be carried from this square to the wide world.

A
few meters away, the mobile clinics were parked at the curb - several
of them. They were actually huge ingeniously converted trucks. I went up
the stairs of one of them, knocked at the door. Someone opened and I
was let inside where a woman was giving her full breast to her baby,
while the doctor and a nurse were showering her with medical advice.

And
here, what stunned me was the trust – absolute and powerfully
expressed: between the mother and the doctor, the nurse and the woman
and between all of them and me. It took me just a few seconds to explain
what I was doing here. We exchanged polite greetings. I asked whether I
could film. “Yes, of course”, all of them nodded. It was up to me to
set the limits. I was expected to be discreet, but I was not told to be.
It was understood that all of us were gathering here for an important
reason: to help Bolivia and its people. The doctor was probably Cuban,
and the nurse was local. I did not ask; it did not matter. A true
internationalist should not care much about one’s geographical, cultural
or other roots.

What
mattered though was that right in front of my eyes something that would
be unimaginable just a few years ago was suddenly taking place: in once
impoverished and racially divided and classist Bolivia, a white man, a
doctor, was looking with simple warmth and human compassion at a
suffering indigenous woman breastfeeding her baby, asking her “When did
you feel pain the last time, mother?”

He
behaved in a simple, kind, decent and humane way, but in a world
increasingly kidnapped by financial and personal interests his humanism
felt like some extreme, like a reminder of different era. He was a
doctor and he behaved like one, as doctors were expected to behave in
the not so distant past. But here as in so many other places all over
the world, it had been so common instead of inquiring, “Where does it
hurt?” to ask for the credit card number or cash deposit, that normal
behavior felt something of an anomaly.

At
one point the doctor patted the woman’s arm, kindly. He was of a
different race and background, and he behaved as her equal, making her
feel calm and confident. After a while she began answering his questions
quietly and boldly, as if she were speaking to a member of her own
family.

*

At
this point I knew I was witnessing the revolution. I had witnessed
quite a few of them, as well as many civil wars all over the world. But
this was different. There were no Kalashnikovs, no combat zones, but
this was as big as the Sandinistas in Nicaragua “going up”, taking the
Congress, some decades ago.

Unlike
the doctors concerned with their inflated salaries – in Bolivia and all
over the world – the doctors working here appeared cool and confident,
at ease and clearly at peace with themselves and the world and above
all, with their own conscience. They seemed to have no need for complex
philosophical somersaults explaining why they were stuffing their purses
instead of serving the needy. They were doing exactly what they were
trained to do: saving lives, offering advice, and being there for those
in pain and in distress, nothing more, nothing less.

Just
watching these doctors working in the middle of Cochabamba I felt
overwhelmed and at the same time endlessly grateful. It was like coming
home from an extremely long and unsettling journey, dotted with
nightmarish images depicting perversely but accurately the direction the
world was heading to, or rather to where its kidnappers were taking it.
Coming back from the journey where commercial interests stand above
compassion, where ‘helping’ those in need and in pain is simply a good
business and has its price tag, mostly ridiculously inflated.

To
me these sights in the middle of the Bolivian Andes were like the
essence of the human nature – by now almost extinct but still the
essence – played in front of my eyes. And I was very much aware of the
fact that this was exactly the socialism in which I had believed for
decades; it was right here, in action, in front of my eyes. And it was
simple, natural and non dogmatic.

Then I recalled one of the greatest novels ever written - The Plague (La Peste)
- of Albert Camus, and the unforgettable phrase “And unable to become
saints, they became doctors”. I thought about the main character, a
simple doctor named Bernard Rieux, who when the plague began ravishing
the Algerian city of Oran, stood against unimaginable horror and
destruction, and against all odds fought the illness with all his
knowledge and might, losing his wife, losing everybody he loved in the
process, but at the end winning the battle and saving his city. As I
watched the doctors working in the center of Cochabamba, it was evident
that they, as was Dr Rieux in The Plague
were not only fighting diseases, they were fighting fascism! In
Cochabamba and in Oran, they were struggling for the entire humanity.

*

Then
I looked around some more. I realized that I knew these women well. I
had covered the civil war in neighboring Peru for more than a year in
the 90s, I had driven through Bolivia - this poorest country of South
America - from North to South, and from East to West so many times I
could not even count. They were always ‘there’, these women in colorful
dresses and black hats - silently watching, standing by the side of the
roads, selling fresh fruits and cheap imported goods on the sidewalks:
the indigenous women of Peru, of Ecuador, of Bolivia.

The women of Altiplano
used to appear to me as some incarnation of pain and stoicism, of a
once tremendous and now destroyed culture, of hopelessness and the
miraculous ability of human beings to survive the worst that life can
serve on its dirty and cracked plates.

In
the past, I always tried to avoid their eyes, because I felt shame and
because I did not know how to help them. In Bolivia, for decades, a
revolution had been postponed indefinitely. The country was silently
bleeding, governed by shameless and Euro-centric elites. It was a man’s
world, but in which, even the men – or more precisely their great
majority - were going through a dehumanizing and constant humiliation. A
decisive revolution appeared to be the only act capable of offering
some hope; capable of overthrowing the feudal fascist system.

Decades
ago, Che Guevara died for this country; one of the greatest
revolutionaries of all times had fallen alone here, helpless, abandoned
and betrayed. But for him not to fight in Bolivia and for Bolivia would
have been like not fighting at all; it would have been a thorough
hypocrisy. Because it was precisely here – in this cold, inhospitable
but endlessly beautiful mountains, in the clay huts of Altiplano, in the hot, humid and predominantly feudal settlements lost in the middle of selva
– jungle – that more than 500 years of colonial and post colonial
brutality and madness showing its most terrible face had stripped of all
humanity and humanism.

This
is where Potosi’s veins were opened, this is where she was stripped
naked and robbed of everything, her children dying in the mines for the
glory of European civilization. The richest city on earth, the city of
silver, with its people forced to die likes animals for the Crown, and
for the brave and glorious European culture!

The
plight of these women was hidden. Many of those journalists who were
writing in Bolivia and Peru were paid, directly or indirectly, not to
expose the harsh realities of the local people.

Of
course there were some sparks of outrage, of fury, like those in the
films by Francisco Lombardi, the greatest Peruvian filmmaker. He
directed his “La boca del lobo” (‘Wolf’s Mouth’, 1988), depicting the
‘Dirty War’ in the Peruvian Andes, which I had covered and which changed
me forever, and the terror the indigenous people had to face. There, he
showed a rape of a simple indigenous girl. It was a rape that was not
even considered a rape by the soldiers who committed it, because the
girl was indigenous – and in the eyes of city folks hardly human.
Lombardi shows half-mad soldiers believing they were on the mission to
get all local women pregnant. And then he dared to show the horror of
extra judiciary execution, a mass murder of the villagers killed simply
for being there, and at the end, he showed a boy called Vitin Luna; a
boy who joined the army to serve his country as his father had done in
the past. He showed Luna drunk, shattered and disillusioned, suddenly
risking his career and his life, challenging the lieutenant who oversaw
the rape and the killing to a game of Russian roulette in one of the
greatest and most powerful moments in Latin American cinema. Waving the
gun, smashing the door of the house in the middle of the night,
screaming in the darkness: “Come down, lieutenant! Come down if you
really have balls!”

Many
years ago I showed the film to my acquaintance in La Paz, the owner of a
major daily newspaper and the son of a Senator. I asked him: “Don’t you
think that one day there will be people banging at the gate of your
mansion?” He gave me a big smile, as he was packing his golf bag. “They
will come”, he said. “Of course one day they will come. But before that,
I will be having plenty of fun while they will be eating shit.”

*

“Try
this”, I was handed a cup of yoghurt with local herbs. “It is really
good for you – all natural”. Several nutritionists explaining to local
people how to incorporate healthy things they have and grow into their
daily diet.

I
moved further and was asked to register my family for some government
health program. I tried to produce the most outrageous Chilean accent I
could manage, but it didn’t deter the enthusiastic government employee.
“You don’t live here? But you definitely know some people who do. Bring
them here, we will tell them to sign up; it is for their own good.”

The
entire atmosphere was of socialist realism brought to its best. It was
naïve, sincere and to be in the middle of it felt extremely well and
warm. People working on the square appeared to be fully stripped of any
cynicism, sarcasm and self-interest. The government, medical staff and
hundreds of women who were on the receiving end were interacting
naturally and confidently. There was calm and plenty of good will, but
there was no artificiality – not many pre-fabricated smiles and no
unnecessary or extreme courtesy.

*

Many
years ago a friend of mine, a translator and writer Kevin Mathewson who
presently lives in Brazil, recalled the first days of the Nicaraguan
revolution that he experienced in Managua:

“What
I found the most powerful was not the revolution itself, but what it
unleashed. One day I was standing at the side of the road. The bus was
passing. It was full of girls from the countryside, dressed in their
best. The bus was packed. Some girls were barefoot, but they were all
very clean and very excited. You see, they were going to downtown
Managua; they were going to dance. For the first time in their lives
they were going to be allowed to enter the places that were just few
days earlier reserved only for the elites. Suddenly, they knew they
could… There was so much anticipation and hope and excitement radiating
from their faces… This was the moment when I understood that this
revolution was right. When I saw those shy countryside girls going to
the capital city which was suddenly theirs.”

I felt the same, in the middle of the festive square of Cochabamba.

The
music erupted. Many women spontaneously moved towards its source; the
provisory stage. Until then, most of them had known only hard work; they
had no opportunity to learn how to dance, but they wanted to be
included, they wanted to live. They
moved their feet clumsily, they smiled apologetically, and they kept
trying and trying to dance. Some outsiders may have found their
movements ridiculous, but here, nobody was laughing. It was their
square, their city and their country. They were testing and tasting the
first steps of their own hard earned freedom, not the freedom
prefabricated and pushed down the throats by the West.

For
some of them, their new life was starting at the age of 18 or even
sooner, but many were well into their 60s. It did not seem to matter
much. They were all learning how to walk, how to take the first steps –
the steps of the people who suddenly realized that the country and the
society in which they lived now actually belonged to them, and not the
other way around.

*

I
travelled throughout the country and I heard the voices of those in
favor as well as those who were against the revolution, as I did earlier
in Venezuela and elsewhere. I spoke to the medics who were throwing red
paint on their clothes, opposing the reforms introduced by the
government. I spoke to those who were deeply involved in the protest
against the new highway that was being carved through the jungle.

I
disagreed with the protesters, because many were using the indigenous
card for their own commercial and political interests, or more precisely
the opposing local media and international media were using these
cards. It was also clear that there were striking similarities between
the protests that were antagonistic to progressive changes in today’s
Bolivia and the protests that have been rocking Venezuela since Chavez
became the President, as well as in Allende’s Chile before the
US-sponsored military coup on 9-11-1973. Many of those protests were
orchestrated and sponsored by the right wing and by those who, as
Eduardo Galeano once said to me, “were paid by somebody, but would not
tell by whom”.

I
do not want to go to the details of my investigation – the details are
disturbing, often appalling. In this essay I am simply offering a
glimpse to those few moments that I lived on one of the squares of
Cochabamba - the moments that by their simplicity and epic beauty made
me, once again, refuse impartiality. After those few moments, in my own
way I joined ‘the Process’, offering my full support to the Bolivian
revolution of Evo Morales.

*

As
I was leaving Cochabamba for La Paz, a military transport BAE-146 jet
encountered great difficulties gaining altitude. It was obviously
overloaded and taking off at great altitude, its four engines seemed to
be roaring in vain, unable to pull the airplane up. After the takeoff,
it had frozen at extremely low height, almost licking the roofs of the
houses. The mountains were
directly in front of us and I knew enough about flying to realize that
either we would be managing to go up or we would crash. I was clearly
aware of the fact that if the plane would make an attempt to make a turn
to avoid the mountain range, it would slide to the side and lose the
altitude sharply, as it was flying too slowly through the air that was
too thin at this altitude.

There
was no panic - I realized that many people on board were probably
flying for the first time, unaware of the danger. And I was simply too
tired to feel anything as I had been working for several days and nights
without rest.

After several tense minutes, the pilots managed to gain altitude and we flew over the mountains, but just about.

The
metaphor was clear, I thought. It was exactly what Bolivia was going
through at this historic period. It was beyond the point of no return,
and it could not change its direction. If the country would leave its
path towards egalitarian society - historically its essence before the
European colonial terror smashed all local cultures - it would simply
crash. There would be almost nothing that would support its wings. The
only way was to go forward, to clench the fists and fly over those
enormous mountains of resistance taken here from abroad; to fly above
all that bad inertia and saturated hopelessness.

The
old BAE-146 and its pilots were like Bolivia, far from perfect. Errors
have been made every month, every week, and every day. But the path has
been correct and well defined. Now everything depended on their will,
skills and guts. Full throttle, take off flaps and up we go, carambas! Dangerous? Yes it was dangerous, as anything worth living and fightingfor always is.

“No
matter what will happen to Evo”, said a young Argentinian philosopher
whom I met on board a mini-van plying at neck-breaking speed between the
border at Desaguadero and the Peruvian city of Puno, “Bolivia will
never go back. It may stumble, slow down, but after what is happening
here right now, return is not an option.”

But
one day before that conversation, approaching the city of La Paz, I was
thinking about the doctors I encountered in Cochabamba. People like
them were on the frontline of the Bolivian ‘Process’. They were fighting
for the country; they were pushing it forward. They were healing and
simultaneously they were building trust and confidence, redefining the
relationships in this profound and ancient part of the world. They were
not saints and they did not claim to be – they were simply
revolutionaries.

At
El Alto International Airport a young doctor had picked me up, my
driver. He was just finishing his degree and driving a cab was one way
to stay afloat.

“It
is good you saw it”, he said. “Westerners: most of them want this
government to fall. They want to grab our natural resources again, to
enslave us. They don’t want Bolivia to be able to govern itself, to show
an example to the world. This is one of the richest countries on earth,
which was made to be one of the poorest. I want to be a doctor, yes.
But not for the status – I want to become one so I would be able to
cure, and also because I want to serve my people.”

I
recalled a poster in Santiago de Chile, several years ago, with the
photo of a student and a few simple words: “I am studying to be a
doctor, so I could take away the pain from which my country is
suffering.”

Everything
was changing in South America. This is what its people wanted for
decades and centuries; this is what they struggled for. Their will was
broken, literally raped by outside forces. Now the new era of
solidarity, of a powerful and determined drive towards building
compassionate and social states was sweeping colonial and post-colonial
mentality and elements aside. The continent was taking off in an
elegant, confident, and majestic fashion.

It
was a very dangerous takeoff, but it was already in the process. It was
now or never, after more than 500 years of humiliation, theft and
plunder.

“Please
stop”, I asked my young friend, a doctor, as we were descending from El
Alto, from more than 4.000 meters, to that enormous crater of La Paz. I
spotted a huge graffiti demanding ‘Medical care for all’ and next to it
a corpulent indigenous lady wearing her traditional outfit. I wanted to
film the scene. As I was shooting, a lady suddenly moved aside,
exposing the rest of the slogan her body had been sheltering before:
“and it should be free!”

I
liked the sight. I liked the lady, looking at me sarcastically but with
a friendly spark in her eyes. I liked this enormous city of La Paz down
below. I liked Mount Illimani covered by snow on the horizon, the
symbol of this glorious and injured culture that was just beginning to
heal. I liked the indigenous flags flying next to those of Bolivia.

“Whom would you like to heal?” I asked my friend, lighting up my Cuban cigarillo.

He did not answer; just waved his hand at the city and at the hills of El Alto, covered by slums.

“Good”, I said. “There will be plenty of work for you here.”

He nodded confidently and proudly, before shifting the gear.

ANDRE VLTCHEK (http://andrevltchek.weebly.com/)
– a novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He lives and
works in East Asia and Africa. His latest books – “Oceania” and
“Indonesia – Archipelago Of Fear” – describe Western neo-colonialism in
Polynesia, Melanesia and Micronesia, as well as unbridled capitalism in
post-1965 Indonesia.